


Exploratory

by esthregreenwood



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-06 23:43:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14658711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esthregreenwood/pseuds/esthregreenwood
Summary: Burke thinks back to all the reasons he loves Cristina, and why he cannot make her become something she is not meant to be.





	Exploratory

“You eat red meat?”  
“...You don’t?”  
When they began their relationship, it wasn’t news to Burke that Cristina was somewhat of an enigma; being of unparalleled intelligence and ambition, blunt but rather distant, she was as idiosyncratic as they come. Despite their unrelenting attraction and chemistry, he expected a significant amount of inelegance to their interactions outside the hospital. He of course knew what was open to public knowledge––mainly the things which she could boast about––she’d graduated from Smith College, earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UC Berkeley, and her M.D. from Stanford School of Medicine, where she graduated first of her class. He knew that investing in a relationship with her wasn’t exactly slumming. Getting involved with an intern wasn’t something he regarded lightly. That is, he wasn’t ready to simply give up on trying to break her tough shell. But he was Preston Burke. If anyone were capable of this challenge, it was him. He wanted to make sure this girl would be worth his time and effort.  
He learned a lot by just observing her at work. She preferred to use the term “pickups” instead of “forceps” and the coffee cart by the front entrance over the cafeteria. He liked the way she pronounced details with a short e, and mature as “mahtoor”. And some things he had to discover by way of less than desirable means. Her pregnancy?––an OR board. The fact that her parents divorced when she was three?––her mother. The apartment she kept despite having moved in with him?––a phone call from her landlord.  
His heart nearly palpated when he was first introduced to her apartment. For a surgeon, it was far from a sterile field. She tried to dissuade him from wanting to move in together, showed him her six months of unread magazines, unwashed clothes, and dusty surfaces. It was always something. But he let her keep the key to his apartment. Eventually she stayed through the nights. Eventually she gave up her other apartment.  
So she had moved in. Another layer cut away from her tough exterior. More exposed. She had already told him that she snored. Now he knew it was true. But even being the confident “cardio-god” that he was, having her in his house, willingly and on a regular basis, eased his insecurity. She wasn’t “his”. She wasn’t someone who would yield, she was (almost) never wrong. He should have had the upperhand, hell, it was almost a breach of ethics, he was her boss. Still he always seemed to be at a loss, and leveling the playing field with this progress made Preston feel a bit better about his place in her life.  
A large part of making her open up was forcing her to know him as well. He thought back to Thanksgiving. As he carved the turkey she sat with a bottle of liquor in the dining room, rather horrified that he had made nice with her peers. She didn’t know he could cook, she didn’t know he could be friendly, she didn’t know anything other than Preston Burke, Head of Cardio. It prompted her to flee for a number of hours.  
Before they left, he paused for a moment in the car.  
“I was nice.”  
“Yeah, I noticed,” she smiled.  
“You don’t ask a lot of personal questions. And you’re very hard to get to know.”  
She was blank for a moment, and then accepted this, “Yes.”  
So he told her something she would never care to ask. He had to make the first step, the least she could do was not turn it away, “My mother owns a restaurant in Alabama.”  
Naturally, she replied with the details of her work day, because in the end, that’s just who she was. There was more to her than surgery and medicine, but the bulk of her persona was informed by hospitals and academia. He accepted that. However, he also knew that he was different. He was a person first.  
She didn’t recognize religious holidays. Now, that didn’t make her any less of a person, of course, but it did add to her particularly blunt secularity. At the same time it added to her somehow charmingly cold pragmatism. She said she was Jewish. A lot. But she was an atheist. Obviously. The contrast was endearing in a very Cristina kind of way.  
Somehow he got that unconventional Cristina to wear a ring. He took that Cristina to bridal shops, that Cristina tried cake, that Cristina met with his mother, that Cristina dealt with her mother. She was not a typical girlish bride and yet she was going to be married as one. He was grateful for her cooperation. She became a bride and he was very happy. she seemed happy for him.  
At the end of it all, outside of her difficulty, her hostility, her obsession with work––he loved her. He loved her even when she sat on their counter eating cereal and they weren’t speaking. She was snarky humor and defiance and working a shift through a 103 degree fever. He loved finding her alone in their apartment, skinny ribs and tiny hips dancing, with headphones in her ipod, frothy toothbrush in her mouth, and curly raven hair wagging with her limbs. As he delved into her heart, he would fall further, and she would soon consume him, but if he opened her up too much, if the incision cut too deep, she might very well fall apart. Although he loved her, it was always a struggle. He loved her so much that he finally thought it best to leave her to heal on her own.  
Preston stood at the altar in suspended time. He thought this all at once and in a moment and a moment ago. His mother sat with her judging drawn eyebrows in the first pew and his own eyes felt heavy with guilt because he knew Cristina was in the church somewhere, and she shouldn’t be.  
He strode to the back and stopped for a breath of thought before he opened the big white doors, heavy like the weight on his heart. There she stood, frantic, but ready, like someone standing on the edge of a bridge. She was not truly happy. This wasn’t who she wanted to be. This is what he wanted them to be.  
She tried to convince him she had the same vision but he had invested so much of his time into her that he knew, he knew that this was not the truth, not the ideal reality.  
He told her “I'm up there waiting for you to come down the aisle and... I know you don't want to come. If I loved you, I wouldn't be up there waiting for you. I would be letting you go.”  
And he did love her. That mattered more than her being worth the “time and effort” he put into getting to know her. Truly knowing her taught him that she could not be his wife. The act itself would alter her, and he could not live with himself for having condoned that. So he left. He let her go. He went to his apartment, took his trumpet, his grandmother’s portrait, and left. He loved her so much. This was just the one time that he opened someone up, and could not bring himself to put her back together again.


End file.
